is Social Media is helpful for online business

I suspect this is self serving, but why not give us your opinion and thoughts instead of just opening it to the floor.

What do you think John, and what is your personal experience?

Yep, it would be good to know why you ask the question - are you looking at embarking on some sort of activity to promote your own business via SM?

Social media can be a boost or a curse towards the society. It has become a powerful tool in todays society. It can create positive and negative reviews about any product.

Yes social media is vital to promoting your online business. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and guest posting are all important tools of social media. You also shouldn't forget about traditional marketing options such as promotional products, which can be helpful in promoting offline.

So everyone agrees it's important, but is anyone going to actually back it up with any facts?

Can you give any examples of how social media has helped your business? eg, I ran a sales promotion via twitter and facebook, and saw a 50% increase in sales based on traditional marketing? Or we ran a survey on twitter and it went viral, burying us in results... kind of thing

Has anyone got any genuine results they would like to share?

I get the impression everyone does it because they feel they have to, as that's what everyone else tells them to do.

Who has seen some genuine business results other than a bunch of likes or thank you's? Impress us all with your social marketing prowess so we can all learn

Are you going for the most generic answer in the world?

How about some detail? Give us some examples of companies that are doing well, or tell us about your own experiences?

The million dollar question is what you did to promote though. I know everyone has their own techniques etc so it would be great to know what was done to make social media marketing campaigns so successful. I mean, as we speak there are members asking what to do to improve their campaigns, so any insights would be awesome I think

A friendly competitor of ours makes a claim that twitter does bring traffic to his website - so obviously his web stats reveal that people are indeed clicking through from twitter. However, this is a company that pays for google adwords, bing, pays for offline advertising in magazines and the press - so obviously the social media campaigns aren't the whole story.

He also runs display advertising in places like ferries and travel venues, so my view is that social media is only part of a whole picture and that you still need an advertising budget and a slick marketing campaign to outsmart the competition.

Margaret

Hi Margaret, I think you are spot on, a marketing campaign should be a blended approach of different techniques.

I suspect Social Media may be more of a message re-inforcement, or touchy feely approach rather than more traditional marketing and generating direct sales. I guess the balance is how much time (and cost) you assign to it.